(Newser)
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For nearly seven decades, some 50,000 residents of India and Bangladesh have existed in a kind of limbo, tied up in one of the strangest border disputes in living memory. But with the stroke of midnight on Friday, their lives may have become a lot easier. As part of an agreement reached in 2011 and ratified in June, 162 pockets of land belonging to one country but surrounded by another—111 Indian plots in Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi parcels in India—hoisted new national flags on July 31, reports the Wall Street Journal. The enclaves joined the country that surrounds them, while 37,000 Indians and 14,000 Bangladeshis now have a choice: Stay and accept their new nationality, or move, reports the AP. While neither option is necessarily convenient, the Washington Post gave a hypothetical that shows just how inconvenient the previous situation could be.

Someone living in an enclave might technically need a visa to enter the country that surrounds their land, but getting that visa would require passing through the other country so they could get the visa from a major city in their homeland. And then there was the third-order Indian enclave of Dahala Khagrabari—the only one of its kind in the world—which was enclosed within a Bangladeshi enclave, which was framed by an Indian enclave, which was surrounded by Bangladesh. Most enclaves also had little administration or infrastructure; one man describes sneaking past border guards to get to school. A Bangladeshi official tells the AP no one from Bangladeshi enclaves within India has requested to be moved to Bangladesh; 979 people from Indian enclaves have asked for such a relocation to India. (This US-Canada border dispute could get violent.)

I applaud this common-sense resolution, even though it took them roughly seventy years to make it happen.

rhinojake

Aug 3, 2015 5:45 PM CDT

---This US-Canada border dispute--- Or as quasi-comical as the 1859 Pig War between the US and Britain which took 13 years to resolve as to the boundaries in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Part of the reason it took so long to resolve was the "small distraction" of the Civil War and aftermath. Another curious boundary dispute, even longer than the Bangladesh-India dispute, was the 1998 SCOTUS decision, which had been raging since an 1831 SCOTUS case, settled by a, 1834 compact between NY and NJ. NJ sued NY in 1992 , claiming that based on the 1834 compact the landfill used to expand Ellis Island over the years belonged to NJ. While the Feds hold legal title to Ellis Island the issue ultimately revolved around the allocation of a relatively small amount of sales tax revenue derived from the museum. The 1834 compact provided that NJ owned the "submerged lands" around Ellis Island, and, under common law, SCOTUS noted, sudden shoreline changes have no effect on boundaries. The following is an excellent account of the dispute and SCOTUS decision http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/27/nyregion/ellis-island-verdict-ruling-high-court-gives-new-jersey-most-ellis-island.html

JKBoss

Aug 3, 2015 3:25 PM CDT

OK guys. Please read the history and reasons behind this odd situation. It's Modi's statesmanship that has resolved the situation and given clarity to 10s of thousands of "stateless" people.